College-level learning doesn’t always occur in the classroom. We understand that the skills and knowledge you have acquired may have come through learning in the office, on the factory floor, in the military, or through various other life activities. And we believe you should be awarded college credit for that college-level learning. That’s where our Prior Learning Assessment programs can help. These options provide you, through course challenges, portfolio creation, and tests, the opportunity to earn college credits more efficiently and at a reduced cost. Prior Learning Assessment: It’s credit for what you know.
The Office of Prior Learning Assessment is a Vermont State Colleges program administered and housed at CCV. Our goal is to provide convenient options to request credit for college-level learning and experience you may have gained through work and training, military or community service, online or individual study.
Your Knowledge + Expertise
Equals College Credit!
Take our 5 minute assessment to see how you can save time & money toward college!
Upcoming PLA Events
You’ve worked, served in the military or volunteered. Now get college credit for these activities through our portfolio courses, Assessment of Prior Learning and Focused Portfolio Development.
Portfolio Courses
You can challenge a CCV course by demonstrating your mastery of the course objectives of that course. You will be evaluated by a CCV faculty member who teaches the course.
Course Challenge
If you’re attending one of the five Vermont State Colleges, or you’re a member of the military, you can sign up for one of two testing options offered at the CCV-Montpelier campus.
Credit by Examination
Prior Learning Success Stories
Outside the historic Battell Block that houses CCV-Middlebury, rain comes down in steady sheets of gray. Inside, it’s cozy. A small math class murmurs from across the hall. Students hunker over their work in the learning center. In the computer lab, Farhad and Amtul Khan sit side by side, nervous and eager in equal measure—they’ve ducked in out of the rain to talk about why this place means so much to them. That “side by side” detail is key. The Khans are husband and wife, and they’re both CCV students. Surely they aren’t the first married couple to be here together, and surely they won’t be the last. But their partnership is unique. It begins, quite literally, with a wedding.
Both Farhad’s and Amtul’s families emigrated—separately—from Hyderabad, India.
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The Bourbeau family farm in Sheldon is iconic Vermont: Wide expanses of neatly-groomed fields surround stout red dairy barns and a cluster of tidy buildings where maple sap is boiled into syrup. Holsteins poke broad heads through open barn walls. Fields lie in even rows of freshly-mown hay, the grass deep green and fragrant. The farm is iconic for its beauty, but also because it proudly showcases the work ethic of its people. Walking across a gravel driveway, the history of the place is nearly palpable. The farm has been in the Bourbeau family since 1948, and the original brick farmhouse was built in the mid-nineteenth century.
The woman who labors behind the scenes here in Sheldon is Kimberly Bourbeau. She keeps track of each page of paperwork, each number, each letter, year after year.
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Community College of Vermont’s Assessment of Prior Learning (APL) course added another 13 students to its completion ranks on May 6, all of them Comcast employees.
“For years I have been interested in revisiting a return to higher education,” said Travis Miller, a Customer Care Supervisor, “and this presented the perfect opportunity to do so.”
The success of the course is nothing new for CCV—more than 7,000 Vermonters have been through the three-credit, semester-long class since it began in the 1970s. But the partnership with Comcast is unique in that the class was held on-site at Comcast’s South Burlington location and provided their employees a chance to begin working toward a degree without the burden of paying up front and being reimbursed.
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The adage goes: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And that’s what most people would think when they hear that it’s possible to earn thousands of dollars’ worth of college credits in fifteen weeks’ time for about $1,000. But they’d be wrong.
“I was telling my husband that if you figure it at about $400 per credit, then $20,000 worth of college credits for about $1,000, well, you can’t go wrong there,” said Kim Sweatt. Sitting in her office at Ethan Allen Furniture in Beecher Falls, Sweatt looked about as happy as, well, anyone who saved themselves $19,000 and years’ of time would. The mother of four, wife, Canaan school board member, and assistant product engineer at the furniture makers’ northern Vermont facility had just recently heard that she’d been awarded fifty-one credits through the Assessment of Prior Learning (APL) course she’d taken at CCV’s Newport Academic Center.
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APL/FPD Trancripts
Alumni of the Assessment of Prior Learning or Focused Portfolio programs should use this special request form to transfer those credits earned.
Questions?
Ask a CCV Advisor, contact the Office of Prior Learning Assessment at 802-828-4064 or priorlearning@ccv.edu, or attend a free information session. Information sessions are frequently offered either at CCV academic centers or through webinars.
